If someone spends many hours a day watching someone with particular quirks, it doesn't seem surprising (drawing parallels here to my experience) that those quirks may transfer because their brain starts to make those associations through observation. I would expect that stopping watching that particular person would probably let the transferred tics decay over a period of time (I'd give it a month).
(V. S. RAMACHANDRAN)
The author/researcher says he believes that is one of the main mechanisms of human learning (babies look at adults and imitate. Adults look at other adults and imitate. Subconsciously)
What you are describing sounds very similar.
At some point the child gets old enough that you start to feed them 'baby food' on a spoon. The child isn't used to eating off of a spoon so for many weeks the process is messy. The initial challenge is getting them to open their mouth wide enough for the spoon to enter. And telling them 'open your mouth' is not particularly useful since they don't understand English at that age.
Instead, the following instinct kicks in: as you approach their mouth with the spoon, your own mouth opens. They see your mouth open and then open theirs. The crazy part is that your own mouth opening happens involuntarily at the moment you want their mouth to open. It is difficult to suppress it if you try.
I've also noticed the reverse. When the child gets a little older, they at some point want you to open your mouth, because they want to feed you something or they are curious about the inside of your mouth (this is a phase they go through). They seem to also involuntarily open their mouth wide when they want you to open yours.
Negative reinforcement is what boot camp uses. If you square your corners, you won't get shouted at. The "negative" aspect relates to the lack of shouting, and the reinforcement relates to the fact that the shouting is unpleasant.
At home, positive punishment would be making fun of the tendencies, and negative punishment would have meant receiving no validation for the behaviour.
Before social media, there were movies that molded society. Bollywood and more recently K-dramas/K-pop have influenced an entire generation.
Often these were used for shaping a younger generation as a long term strategy for a desirable adult demographic. To a certain extent, it is happening in our American public school system. Everyone who comes through it are kind of identical. It may not be apparent to those who have never stepped out of the States, but it is obvious to those outside or have known other cultures.
With social media impacts, its effect is like an oil spill. Even if you can contain it, it will be messy, expensive and traumatic for years and years. This is a Faustian bargain we have made.
As someone who moved to the US in his mid-teens (from a non-english-speaking country), that's quite literally me with British movies.
After watching a few over a weekend, Mondays are usually rough, as I end up saying random words in British accent and immediately correcting myself.
> Fourth, in some patients, a rapid and complete remission occurred after exclusion of the diagnosis of Tourette syndrome.
To a first approximation, the kids are 'faking it'. The third point I didn't quote was that symptoms appear when it will preclude then from doing a tedious task, and then disappear when they are doing something they want to do.
> Fourth, in some patients, a rapid and complete remission occurred after exclusion of the diagnosis of Tourette syndrome.
It also mentions other examples of MSI, where symptoms across the group would subside after a couple weeks or months. So yeah, in most cases all it needs is someone to say Stop That! You're imagining things
I am by all accounts neurotypical (except perhaps for a touch of Aspergers) but I have an involuntary tic. Every now and then (like once or twice a week) a memory of some incredibly stupid thing that I once did -- sometimes decades ago -- will pop into my head and before I can re-establish conscious control I'll make a vocalization that sounds like a cross between a whimper and a sneeze. It's kind of embarrassing, but usually I cover it up with a cough afterwards. I don't think anyone has ever actually noticed except me.
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But what I did was tell myself to not react like that again next time. Of course, that didn't work, but it made me notice it better. And after repeating that for some time, I had timely control over the reaction (not over the stimulus that provoked it). If your tic is light and annoys you, you could try that. Your subconscious is capable of picking up more than you think, and it is (somewhat) malleable.
https://www.reddit.com/r/socialskills/comments/hzgm1n/how_to...
https://www.reddit.com/r/socialskills/comments/2nnff4/how_to...
I do it. When i'm alone, and one of those thoughts hits, me, i often vocalise a bit. If i'm in company i just wince (if i made a noise in front of other people when i thought of something embarrassing, that would be embarrassing, so that would lead to a sort of embarrassment Kessler syndrome).
Thank you, this is a genuinely great turn of phrase.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11393607/
"In sum, EMDR appears to be no more effective than other exposure techniques, and evidence suggests that the eye movements integral to the treatment, and to its name, are unnecessary."
But here's a case report showing a reduction in tics after EMDR.
https://ijponline.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13052-...
If that's the best you've got, that makes me even more confident that EMDR is bogus.
> Clearly you have an agenda.
Indeed I do. My agenda is to seek the truth, and to debunk bogus scientific claims wherever I encounter them.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.0218...
https://img.ifunny.co/images/81b1345612c2c66153ac111e99d41b2...
https://www.thecut.com/article/how-to-stop-reliving-embarras...
I've found that sitting with the thought for a little while and processing the emotion prevents it from coming up again. You can't just remember that girl in first year of uni that made an effort to hug you every day and flee the thought every time, painful as it is. You have to sit there and go through it. Yes I was young and stupid, but the reason I even cringe thinking about it is because I am now better. And that is ok.
This happens to me as well, but usually I just kind of mutter 'damnit' under my breath or 'ugh'. Maybe shake my head a little.
In a lot of ways SAD feels like a form of PTSD where instead of a single extremely traumatic experience, or many extreme experiences(known as complex PTSD), it's a huge amount of slightly traumatic ones. So it's sort of like a flashback.
One of the things I've noticed is that when I'm on SSRIs and they're working(which has never been a long-lived state of affairs, unfortunately), this phenomenon is drastically reduced or even gone altogether.
I've also wondered if my ADHD somehow factors into it, but that I don't know.
I get the impression those without adhd can just concentrate without a mind full of fluff - I can't imagine what that must be like!
I am wondering if you've tried EMDR after the event happens? So you have the thought that triggers the tic and then you'd focus intensely on the event and do the EMDR stuff. That may reduce the intensity of the past event and reprogram your nervous system to not trigger so intensely on it.
Assumed it wasn't just me who did this but glad to know there are others.
The article itself makes it clear. There's an obvious reward for these behaviors. This youtuber got exceptionally popular very quickly and was able to turn that into appearances on other shows. The other patients are also noted to have their "symptoms" express themselves during unpleasant tasks, but to be missing during pleasant ones. To the point it gets them out of doing the unpleasant work.
We've built a system that rewards this behavior because we built a system that also makes this behavior profitable. To me, these results shouldn't be a surprise, and I wonder if this "new illness" is really just an emergent lower level expression of something like Munchhausen syndrome; now given a wider and less sophisticated audience to play to.
> patients often reported to be unable to perform unpleasant tasks because of their symptoms
> resulting in release from obligations at school and home
> symptoms temporarily completely disappear while conducting favourite activities
This is a textbook example of secondary gain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_and_secondary_gain
> So, the weird thing is not they pick up someone else's tics but they cannot get rid of them.
In some cases they did get rid of them after the ruse was discovered and no longer served any purpose.
> in some patients, a rapid and complete remission occurred after exclusion of the diagnosis of Tourette syndrome
So, the weird thing is not they pick up someone else's tics but they cannot get rid of them.
Learnt behaviour, copying, or physical tics that once learnt get stuck in the brain?